“And then yesterday morning a thought zoomed in, and rather than swat it away like a mosquito before it had a chance to get comfortable, I let it land on me. And rather than squashing it or flicking it before it could do too much damage, I just stood there watching it get fatter and fatter on the blood I was providing for it.”
Okay . . . surely that wasn’t how he would have said it.
“You’ve had those thoughts? Cool. Please teach me how to be as unaffected by them as you clearly are. What is this sorcery you practice?”
Nope. Still not quite right.
“I never had those thoughts. But since yesterday morning, they seem to be the only thoughts I’m capable of thinking.”
Not perfect, but better.
Of course, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what he had wanted to say or planned to say or needed to say. He didn’t say anything. When push came to shove and the opportunity for unstable-emotional-declarations-that-would-open-the-door-for-unpredictable-and-potentially-friendship-destroying-responses presented itself, he’d chickened out and not said a word.
Although had he chickened out? Really? Sure, right then as they continued strolling down Varick in silence, it felt like it. But he was pretty sure that the future of their friendship would thank him later. Their conversation had taught him two things he hadn’t known before:
We’re obsessed with what comes next. We’re obsessed with the idea that there has to be more.
But Laila was right. What more could there possibly be than what they already had?
“That sign says we’re on Seventh Avenue,” she said, breaking the silence that had existed between them since leaving Shake Shack. She looked behind her. “Did we get off of Varick somewhere?”
Cole joined her in looking back. He could still spot the green Shake Shack sign. “No, I don’t think so. Varick must have become Seventh, I guess.”
He had no idea when or how that had happened, but the day was about getting lost, right? Finally, maybe they were on to something.
“Let’s just keep going north.”
She laughed. “Look at you. Pulling out big words like north.”
“Sorry. My bad. I meant ‘up toward other stuff.’”
They crossed a one-lane intersection and began commenting on the architecture they were passing. Not in any refined, knowledgeable ways. Laila was obsessed with the Architectural Digest videos where you got to look around celebrities’ houses, but apart from that, they weren’t architecture people. But every single building here was so unlike anything they could find in their tiny mountain town. In Tribeca—were they still in Tribeca?—they were surrounded by dark red and brown bricks, without any pinewood or Pro-Panel roofing in sight. And while you didn’t have to look too hard in Adelaide Springs to find artifacts and even miraculously intact cliff dwellings and kivas from the Ute tribe migrating through in the 1300s, and the history of silver mining in the nineteenth century that was written across practically every acre of land, they still couldn’t stop commenting about how so many of the buildings around them looked so much older than any they had ever seen back home.
“Do you think early Dutch settlers lived there?” Laila asked as they passed an old-looking redbrick single-level that now housed a sports bar.
“I don’t think the early Dutch settlers built those kinds of structures, did they?”
“No idea.”
Next to the bar sat a six-story gray structure that looked like it had been spliced down the middle, like a double-wide mobile home having to be split onto two separate trucks to be moved. But it had lost its other half.
She stopped and studied it. “Do you think that used to be a textile factory?”
He looked down at her and chuckled, and then looked up again and tried to give it serious consideration. “Yeah, I really don’t have any idea. Could have been, I guess. Whatever it was, I like what they’ve done with their fire escapes. It’s very, um . . . what’s the word?”
“I think Architectural Digest refers to it as Neo-Gothic Survivalism.”
Cole spewed laughter and then quickly swallowed it down and raised his hand to his chin, copying her serious-student pose. “Ah. Yes.”
“Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick have decorated their place in it, ground to roof.”
She dropped the stoic expression and winked at him. They began walking again, Laila asking about nearly every building they passed if Cole thought it had some connection to early Dutch settlers or textile factories. As it turned out, she’d gotten through about two paragraphs of Tribeca’s Wikipedia page before dozing off the night before.
At the mention of the night before, he finally got around to asking the question he should have asked her first thing that morning. “I’m sorry. I haven’t even asked how your back’s doing today. You seem better.”
“Oh yeah, I’m fine. I can barely even feel it anymore.”
“Um, that’s called paralysis, Lai. You might want to have that checked out.” Wow. Nothing like falling back on a dad joke when you’re trying to avoid guilt. She was kind enough to respond with only a good-natured groan. “Seriously, I’m glad. And I’m sorry I had your pills. I hope you didn’t need them.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t even think about them, to be honest.”
Silence settled between them again. Of course it did. She still had to have questions. As masterfully as he wanted to believe he’d settled things between them at Shake Shack, she was still probably attempting to piece it all together. He had no doubt that she knew him well enough to be nagged by the feeling that she was missing something. And he knew her well enough to understand that the silence they were currently experiencing was a result of her mind going back to what she had been focused on when she wasn’t thinking about her sore back. Yeah, it was just a matter of time before he had to—
Hang on.
Cole practically skidded to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk, and while he was too distracted to care very much, he was super impressed with the way New Yorkers with their heads down and hoods pulled tight or FaceTiming or pushing caravans of kids in strollers deftly avoided him without missing a beat. But he’d pass along his observations about that later. Right now . . .
Bedford. Bedford, Bedford, Bedford . . .
Why did he know that street name? And why did the indescribable feel of the neighborhood suddenly feel inexplicably familiar? Why did he have a feeling of déjà vu just looking at the name of that street on a sign?
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“No way!” Laila protested at once. “We have a deal. We are right this moment completely lost in New York—”
“Really, Lai?” He looked up from his phone and pointed back the way they had been walking. “A little less than a mile that way. Take a right at Ghostbusters.”
She crossed her arms and huffed. “Well, well, Mr. Navigator. Who’s all big and tough and Wouter van Twiller now?”
He raised his eyes again. “What? What are these words you’re saying?”
“Looks like someone needs to brush up on their Tribeca history.”
Cole grinned and turned his attention back to his phone. “I’m sorry to break the deal, but I promise you . . . if I’m right about what I think I’m right about, you’re not going to be upset for long.” He typed a few more letters and scrolled down and then looked back up at her as his entire face contorted into a confident smirk. “Oh boy. Okay, ready to take a little detour?”
She shrugged. “Would I know the difference?”
“Come on.” He grabbed her hand and began pulling her down Bedford. He couldn’t believe he’d recognized the sign, and he hoped she wasn’t looking up yet, because she would definitely recognize the sign. And she wouldn’t have had to break their deal and pull out her phone to verify. A radar-esque sixth-sense tractor-beam thing was probably going to kick in any moment as it was, like the mother ship calling her home.
“That’s really cool,” she commented, looking down at how 20 MPH was painted on the road as the street got narrower.
How much farther? How much farther?
And then he saw a cluster of tourists—scratch that, he saw multiple clusters of tourists—hanging out with cameras pointed upward at the next corner.
He stepped in front of her, in the middle of the street. There weren’t any cars making their way toward them. It was as if everything had come together to allow him this perfect opportunity to make her happy. To watch her be happy. That was his favorite pastime.
“Laila Evangeline Olivet, how much do you love me?”
She snickered and held his eye contact. “You know—the normal amount.”
Before he said another word, before he took a chance on her looking anywhere but into his eyes, he pulled his phone out again, clicked on his camera, and started filming her.
Her snicker turned into an embarrassed giggle. “What are you doing?”
Cole stepped to the side. She kept watching him, but out of the camera shot he pointed up at the tan brick building with the red-painted first level on the corner of Bedford and Grove.
Confusion and dismay remained on her face for about two seconds, and then her eyes grew wide, her hands flew up to her mouth, and she began hurrying forward to join the clusters of tourists.
Cole laughed and then regretted it. He didn’t want the sound of his voice to interrupt the video of her, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help but laugh at the excitement on her face and the wild pointing and the slack-jawed shock.
“Do you know who lives here?” she asked him in a way-too-loud voice, like when you’re going over a mountain pass and don’t realize your ears haven’t popped. She managed to pull her eyes away long enough to look back at him and then run back into the middle of the street, grab the hand that wasn’t holding the camera, and pull him to the corner with her. “Cole, do you know who lives here?”
“Of course I know.” He just couldn’t stop laughing. “That’s why we’re here, ding-dong.”
“This is Monica and Rachel’s apartment building.”
“Yes, I’m aware.”
“And Chandler and Joey. And . . .”
She faded off as she turned her attention to the other side of Bedford. The non-Friends side of Bedford. She stared at the plain white multilevel apartment building that looked like it had bars on the windows, and then her hands dropped from her face and landed on her hips, and she turned and faced away from him. She began staring at the building across Grove. It wasn’t the moment to discuss it, but his first thought about that structure, with its beautifully out-of-place white panels and red shutters and ornate molding, was that maybe it had been at least inspired by the early Dutch settlers.
“What are you looking at?” he asked her, once again not loving that his voice would be in the video but desperate to get back to the part where Laila was giddy rather than contemplative.
“I’m trying to figure out where Ugly Naked Guy lived.”
“We’ve been over this. Remember? They aren’t real, Lai. Say it with me—”
“Shut up.” She smirked at him over her shoulder and then turned back to face the main attraction. “Ooh!”
There we go. Her eyes were the size of beautiful, sparkling golf balls again. She grabbed his hand once more and pulled him a few feet to the curb.
“That’s the sign. Bedford and Grove. Remember? That’s the sign that they always showed when they were transitioning between scenes.” She tilted her head and crossed her arms as her enthusiasm was somewhat muted once again by reality. “Well, that’s disappointing.”
He followed her gaze to the red first floor where The Little Owl was written across the awning.
“No big orange couch or anything, huh?”
“Don’t get me wrong . . . I didn’t think Central Perk would be here. But I didn’t realize anything was here. Since it is a restaurant—maybe even a coffeehouse from the looks of it?—why would they not pay whatever they had to pay to get the rights to turn it into Central Perk?” She glanced at the tourists all around her. “People would come. Oh yes, Ray . . .” She adopted her version of a James Earl Jones voice. “People would most definitely come.”
A laugh erupted from deep in his chest, and she beamed in delight. Cole had brought her to the Friends apartment, and Laila had pop culturally reciprocated in kind with a Field of Dreams reference. Who had a better best friend than he did? No one, that’s who.
But suddenly her brows furrowed. “Are you still filming?”
“Of course I am.”
She grew camera shy, as she always did. “You can stop now.”
“Why would I do that?”
“If you’re going to film, at least film the apartment building.”
“I think the apartment building’s been filmed enough. If the apartment building is filmed any more, the apartment building’s going to develop a complex.”
She snorted as she tried ducking behind him. “I see what you did there.”
He whipped around and got her back in the scope of his camera just as she weaved herself out of the middle of a group of teenaged girls posing together, yelling out “Pivot!” instead of “Cheese!”
“I’m just saying, it’s low-hanging fruit. Don’t you think?”
“What is?”
She gave up on escaping his camera and began posing for it instead. It was a seamless transition—from trying to cover her face to acting like she was Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate—and one he’d seen countless times. He never got tired of it. There was probably more footage of flirting-with-the-camera Laila using up his iCloud storage than everything else combined.
“Central Perk.” She began walking toward him like a runway model, standing on her tiptoes like she was wearing stilettos instead of high-tops and sucking in her cheeks like she’d sworn off smiling for Lent. “It’s the lowest-hanging fruit of all time.”
“It’s pretty low hanging, I agree, but I have to beg to differ that it’s the lowest.” Cole crouched down in the street and aimed the camera up at her as she made kissy faces at him. “Yeah, work it . . . That’s it . . . One more, just like that . . .” It was all being caught on video, of course, but he began making camera-shutter sound effects, and she struck a new pose with each click of his imaginary lens.
“Then what is?”
“Dunkin’ Punkin’.”
Her sultry stoicism shattered into giggles. “What’s Dunkin’ Punkin’?”
“Well, it’s nothing, because the people at Dunkin’ Donuts won’t return my calls. But it should be the name of their pumpkin-spice latte.”
She considered that for a moment. “That’s genius.”
He shrugged. “I know.”
“Lowest-hanging fruit of all time.”
“This is what I’m saying.”
The photo shoot was over. She turned back to face the Friends building, and he stood from his crouched position and stopped filming. He’d captured some moments that he would treasure for a lifetime, and now he just wanted to be in this moment with her.
“Thank you for bringing me here.” She squeezed herself in under the crook of his shoulder as he extended his arm around her. “Is it so much to ask that every day in my life exceeds my expectations, like it does when I’m hanging out with you?”
Cole chuckled softly. “That seems like a reasonable request.” And he’d give anything to be able to honor it. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head and sighed. “We’re good, right?”
He hadn’t meant to ask it. He felt foolish for asking it, actually, apart from the fact that no filter between them seemed, at least to Cole, like a solid indication that they were, in fact, fine. He needed them to be fine.
“Of course.” She wrapped both arms around his torso and looked up at him. “We’re better than good.”
He studied her face. Not for signs that she was hiding something. Not for indications that there was anything she wasn’t saying. Maybe he should have been, but that just didn’t occur to him right then. Instead, he looked for more signs of their history written across her features. She was wearing a little makeup now, but he liked that she never wore too much. It would be a crime to cover up the freckles across the bridge of her nose. He’d consider it a personal affront if she somehow blended the tiny little scar above her left eyebrow—the one she’d gotten when they were in kindergarten and a mama magpie had misinterpreted her compassion toward her nestlings as a threat—out of existence. And if her lips were ever transformed into anything but that perfect pout . . . The one that made her bottom lip look like it was effortlessly reaching for him . . . The one that he hadn’t noticed over the course of nearly forty years but that he couldn’t stop obsessing over now that his eyes were open . . .
“Shall we carry on?” she asked. “Or should we try to get in there and see if there are any ridiculously oversize rent-controlled apartments we can move into?” She gave him one more squeeze and then began walking back onto Bedford. “Back this way, you think?”
She turned back and faced him when she realized he hadn’t followed. “You okay?”
It was better this way. She was fine. They were good. He was . . .
Well, he wasn’t quite sure what he was. Happy seemed like a bit of a stretch, with all he still had to figure out in his life. And the thoughts he was having about her—no longer the way-in-the-future thoughts his dream had forced upon him but the it-would-be-so-easy-to-kiss-her type that felt so much more dangerous—sort of deprived him of the ability to say he was comfortable and carefree. But he was having fun. He was savoring the moments. He was creating more memories.
He was with Laila.
“I’m great.” He jogged to the curb after her once a bicyclist had passed in front of him. “Who should we go see next? Do Will and Grace live close by? Which Law & Order cops work this beat, do you think?”
“Ooh! Doesn’t Carrie Bradshaw live in the West Village?”
Cole looked behind him—at what exactly, there was no telling. “Where’s the West Village?”
“I’m pretty sure we’re in the West Village.”
“What happened to Tribeca?”
“It’s still there. The Ghostbusters are holding down the fort while we’re away.” She stopped and looked up at him, and he shrugged, causing her to shake her head and laugh. “Your homework assignment for tonight is to at least look at a map.”
And then they carried on toward other stuff, Laila wisely taking over and leading the way.